Following any steps you see in this may result in your Activision account getting restricted, up to and including a full permanent ban.
I am not responsible for the consequences of your actions if you choose to mirror mine.

You have been warned.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (hereon referred to as BOCW) is a bit of a unique case. It's a post-warzone CoD game but not quite. For starters, it's fun it doesn't use ricochet, the kernel-level anti-cheat introduced in Vanguard (2021) and backported to Modern Warfare (2019).
It was not backported to any previous entries in the series, notably excluding BOCW (2020). This means it's possible (as you'll later to see) to run BOCW on linux under proton.

There's been a GitHub Issue open on Valve's Proton repository pertaining to BOCW. Up until fairly recently, all that's come of it was maybe the splash screen but mostly an immediate crash. A GitHub user discovered that applying protonfixes for Black Ops 3, a previous game on the same engine branch, resulted in the game launching, even getting into the menu.

To be clear, getting this game to boot was trivially simple.* You could do this by setting an environment variable to one Black Ops 3 has, and using bleeding-edge proton experimental (which is so common, I already had it set!)

Linux gamers are no stranger to setting environment variables and tweaking launch arguments, you need to do that for many games supported on linux, even ones tested/verified for the steam deck. Me doing this wasn't "going out of my way" or worthy of a ban, let alone a permanent one.

My Activision account was already linked to my steam account, so I can't know for sure, but simply just launching the game likely would've been enough for a permanent ban.

*by this I mean utilizing work done on proton, it took a few months for that work to be done

Naturally, I, seeing a game I love finally working on an operating system I don't hate, jumped on it. Initially, I was met with the same thing,

I read the entire EULA. I was not taking chances. I did not see anything wrong with what I was doing.

The game got this far, but would crash a minute or two in. After trying (and knowingly failing) to matchmake, I called it a night. I closed the game, and went to bed.

When I woke up in the morning, I was met with this email.
Account discriminator redacted, i've already been through enough

And this message on my Steam Deck.

As far as I was concerned, genuinely, nothing wrong happened. EVERY other game I've played with anti-cheat would warn you about running an insecure environment, or prevent you from launching the game entirely. The strictest game I know of, Fortnite, even lets you in a match briefly before kicking you.

This was an unwarranted, unwarned, uncalled for, outright permanent ban.

Once I woke up and processed that, I appealed my ban, with this message:


I then sent it off and went to recover my Need For Speed: Unbound save file four seperate times.

Seven hours after the appeal, a second Activision email hit my inbox.

The argument here is that I was in control of my account when the infraction happened.
Which is a fair point; or at least it would be, if the infraction happened. The problem is, it didn't.

I could get my money back, being banned from the single-player campaign for daring to launch the game on the platform I bought it on sounds like an easy refund, but I do love this game and a refund is the last resort.

Nothing, really. Activision lost like $40 from the cosmetics I would've bought (I had plans to) and when/if I refund the game.